


Two Breeds of Nightmare

by Merovignian



Category: Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft, Green Antarctica - D'Valdron, The Laundry Files - Charles Stross
Genre: Alternate History, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Antarctica is habitable and its people are not friendly, Crossover, Elves are Dicks, Filk, Gen, I might well do other things with the setting fusion later, Implied/Referenced Torture, Maltheism, Multiverse theory's a bitch, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Psychopath Hominid Thunderdome, Psychopathology & Sociopathy, Tags May Change, War Story, also an exploration of ritual magic traditions on the worst continent on earth, but for now an alien culture-clash tale suits me just fine, references to At The Mountains of Madness, this is kind of a testbed for how the settings combine, unlike Howard Philips Lovecraft I can use the word 'cyclopean' CORRECTLY
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-20
Updated: 2020-03-06
Packaged: 2020-09-30 16:38:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 11,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20450237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merovignian/pseuds/Merovignian
Summary: Cassie's Host were not the only survivors of the Necromancers War. In stricken Antarctica a traitor colony lurks, huddling beneath the ruins of the long-dead alien race whose secrets they were sent to uncover. Starving and desperate, they open up the Ghost Roads in search of a place they can flee to, a parallel world where the Last Continent blooms green and bright and fertile.When they find it, they might just wish they hadn't. Welcome to Antarctica, and may whatever deity you believe in have mercy upon your soul. Because the natives will not.Chapter 5. An alien is haunting Yag. It's traditional.





	1. Idylls of the King

**Author's Note:**

> 40th fic in the LF section, go me. I'm reposting this (somewhat edited and rearranged) fic from elsewhere, one chapter at a time. No, I haven't forgotten Cold Iron Bound. I'm just experiencing a bit of a block.
> 
> Green Antarctica is a highly detailed, often disturbing and sometimes kinda edgy alternate history found on AH.com, positing, as the name suggests, a green and habitable Antarctica. It is heavily Cthulhu Mythos inspired, as you will see, and a perfect fit for the Lovecraftian sci-fi pastiche that is the Laundry Files.
> 
> Considering that both of these settings are a little underrepresented in fanfic, I wonder who exactly I'm aiming this monstrosity in the making at. What can I say? You go where the muse takes you, and whilst GA is somewhat infamous for its dark and macabre content, it is nonetheless fascinating. And has enough Laundryverse parallels that, though this is at core a 'hey both these stories have Lovecraftian alternate hominids, let's have them meet' thing, there's room for other stories crossing over other elements of the series. Maybe I'll write them. Maybe not.
> 
> Charles Stross owns the Laundry Files series and I bow before his fanfic policy. Green Antarctica is the work of an entity which goes by the name 'D'Valdron', and we all know good ol' Howie Lovecraft is ultimately behind it all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Credit for the map goes to user rubberduck3y6 on DeviantArt.

Some time before the war to end all wars, one of the King's many consorts was heard to wonder what difference their revolution had made. Huddling in this blasted nation beneath the spires of alien cities as the dark winds blew in eternal night, what did it mean to call yourself King of Antarctica, rather than a governor-general of the Morningstar Empire?

The King took her tongue for the insult. This was seen as a merciful act, by and large; instead of punishing her severely, he merely saw to it that her act of disrespect could not be repeated, and granted her the opportunity to redeem herself. Of course she had to be left behind when the war began, when death rained from the sky and the cold hunger from the ends of the universe swept down from the east, but that was a matter of practicality: damaged goods were not worth saving. It was not personal.

Later, upon his reawakening, the King thought back to that conversation as he lounged upon his throne, its frame built from the bleached bones of the honoured regimental dead. It made all the difference, he told himself. To be one of only a handful upon this wretched earth to be truly free, at the whim of no higher power, to be the holder of one's own chains and bindings.

But what was the lack of food, a traitor thought asked him, if not a chain? What was the promise of death in the world above, if not a bind to lock him in place?

It was a shame he could not pluck out the tongues of his own restless thoughts. Frustrated, the King of Antarctica scowled, and tightened his grip on the arms of his charnel throne.

He had hoped against hope to be the Morningstar by now, to inherit the empire he had spurned. No matter that he had slipped the geas of his former empress through the wording of his mission statement and the fruits of his expedition, this tiny colony clinging to the icy, arid desert at the bottom of the world. The claim was still there: his bloodline and the position he once held should, to his mind, have been recognised. Surely no others were left to contest him? One of his advisors had suggested this was, in the creature's own words, "like trying to have your slave and drain them", at which point he'd had the Magus in question hanged to teach it a lesson. It had spent the next two days dangling from the ceiling of his hall, paralysed from the neck down by a wound which would have killed any other. It would not do to let the blood-drinkers get too arrogant in this world of dim light.

He had spoken to the Oracles and to the Diviners, who had confirmed that he and his followers were utterly struck from their former empire, lacking both obligations and any hope of inheritance. Furthermore, the Empire still lived. This was fortunate, the King had thought. In time they might repair the ships with which they came here, or even the ley line network which had made the crossing so viable. Then they would march to whatever group of glorified border guards had survived the end of the world, and he would take by force the mantle he deserved. By all rights he should have killed the Oracle who told him a fate twelve degrees worse than death awaited should he try to retake the territories of empire. Alas, he was famed for his soft heart.

But it was being tested by the most recent tidings.

"Thus we can predict, to a high value of confidence, that our supplies will be wholly extinguished before the surface world becomes habitable once again. It is, in fact, an open question whether it will ever be feasible to return to the surface."

Two rows of warriors, still enough to be taken for statues in their ornate steel regalia, stood at attention along the edges of the King's hall. Around his throne of skulls and femurs and segmented vertebrae were arrayed a dozen figures, tall and gaunt, the highest viziers and officer-nobility of this starving, desperate army. And amongst their number, as noticeable by the wide berth given by their fellows as by their heavy black robes and cowls, were four Magi of the blood-drinker's cult.

The King's court was austere, even by the standards of the rank he had held before his rebellion. The great hall had been cut out of the bare rock of the Antarctic mountains by the pyromancers of his Host; for reasons they could not name, the alfär were reluctant to take up residence in the titanic structures of the race which had once lived here. The hall was adorned with what wooden furnishings and regimental paraphernalia they had brought from their previous command: paintings and mosaics of sunlight and green fields, the banners of rival empires claimed in battle, the decapitated heads and silver, chitinous tongues of the hated Adversary. There had not been time to invent a history for their mean little excuse for a kingdom, at least not one that matched up to their legacy as the servants of empire, and so the banners and the inscriptions and the flags on the walls still spelled out their former title.

The Seventh Southern Host of Air and Darkness.

"In addition to this, the leyline network between here and the closest habitable landmasses is hopelessly unstable. The fallout from the war has literally reshaped the earth, both physically and thaumically. There is no guarantee we could return to more fertile lands in any reasonable timeframe."

The speaker knelt before His Majesty's throne and fixed his eyes on the cold stone floor, for to look upon the King with his power unleashed was dazzling to the point of pain. Every member of the Host was bound by dire oaths, from the lowliest slave to the highest nobility, and they converged into a blazing knot upon the brow of the ruling monarch. With a sorcerer's eyes one could see the ties which bound every individual in the room and beyond, see the thrumming might of the psychic tithes that empowered their liege until to touch his mind unprotected would set one aflame.

Other societies speak of social contracts, but this one signs them in blood — the entire alfär race was enmeshed in elaborate chains of obligation and subservience which answered violation with death. It was received wisdom amongst them that only such a system could restrain a race intelligent enough to reach sapience; that the drive and competitive fury that went hand in hand with intelligence required brutal, all-encompassing discipline in order to work towards a common goal. To the alfär, this psychic slavery was synonymous with civilization.

"Furthermore, there have been...distressing indications from the vicinity of the underground sea beneath the sites of our last excavations. As Your Majesty will recall, prior to the outbreak of war between the Sisterhood of the Red Night and the Empire of the Morningstar we managed to confirm that at least some of these elder...things, or their servitors, were still extant."

They'd lost more than a few soldiers figuring that one out.

"They were dormant through the war, but the partial reawakening of our Host appears to correlate with increased activity on their part." Trepidation showed through the mask of icy stoicism common to the People as the servitor finished his report.

"And if we were to fight them?" The King looked over his advisors with a dead-eyed expression, and the bearer of bad news knelt even deeper before his lord.

"Your Majesty, it is difficult to judge. There is much we do not know, and in our current diminished state..."

"Answer me."

"Your Majesty I beg you not to force me, for the answer I must give would rightfully spur you to end my life."

The King of Antarctica grasped the meaning, and for a time the assembled alfär wondered if a life would be taken anyway. Then he slumped down in his throne, and a tiny sigh of relief could be heard.

After he escaped...after he became free...the King shivered to himself. That should have been the end of it. He had dreamed of it all his life, in fantasies he'd dared not examine too closely, even inside his own head. To be at the top of the pyramid, with nobody to answer to. Holding every leash, having power over all and sundry. When that day came, he had believed that nothing could hurt him. That he could do anything. And now instead he was trapped beneath this blasted mausoleum of a continent. What did it matter that the Host danced like puppets on his _geasa_, when the blind idiot gods of hunger and cold still held him in their grip? Soon the time-stoppered supplies would run out, and the hydroponic farms beneath the rock would not be enough to save them. He had taken out his wrath on what subjects he had, but nothing had stopped the feeling of helplessness. Of claustrophobia. His fate was to be smothered by the ice, and laughed at by the harsh and mocking winds.

He wondered what the South Pole had looked like when the alien buildings were made, all those aeons ago. When this wretched land was lush and tropical. He imagined verdant fields and lofty fields, dreamed of mountains rude and wild. He thought of all that water trapped in the glaciers, gone. Gone, just vanished, with just enough remaining to make great lakes and roaring rivers and snowy caps on lofty peaks. Not this. Not this dead continent on this dying world.

Not this world.

And with that, the King knew what he had to do.

"We leave," he said quietly. There was no other choice. Maybe there never had been, even without the war. "There must be some world, some shadow of time and possibility, where this blasted land is green and fertile. Find it. Open a way."

To travel between realities. A terrible risk, but compared to the certainty that came with staying here? He'd roll the dice, no matter the outcome.

An entire Host's worth of knights and their steeds. More than fifty Magi with their endless hunger. All the beasts that went with them. And every servant and mechanic and medic and cook and technician and chattel slave needed to keep them functioning, all those thousands upon thousands of hungry mouths...

"Find a world where some variant of the People lives already, that they may support us, that we may slake our hunger, that our Host may be maintained. That we might hide no longer under earth, but be the rulers we deserve to be once more. Open the Ghost Roads and find it."

They would slip Armageddon's noose and go to a place where the hand of fate had been kinder, where this icy landscape abounded with life. Where they would have no rivals, no adversaries, no Dead Gods to come crawling through the cracks his people had made in the world. The native life would bow to them, and he and his would rebuild civilization upon their backs.

Then the resurgent People would sing his name until eternity's end in the paradise he would build, in a warm and green Antarctica.

**

_"They are the utter opposite of everything we know as civilization, yet are not savage. Rather, they are like a black mirror unto ourselves. As industrious, as clever, as restless and dynamic. They have taken my ship apart like a child's puzzle, meditating over each component, striving to duplicate and better the production. I curse the day that the wandering spirit sent men to sail the seven seas. _

_In my heart, I feel fear, because now they know that we exist."_

-Captain James Cook, July 1774, sometime after castration


	2. Fragments

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Notes on the Tsalal of Antarctica. A taster, if you will.
> 
> Credit for the alternate lyrics to 'Skibbereen' goes to user Midnight-Blue766 from alternatehistory.com.

_...for this reticence even extends to treaties made with non-human powers. In the negotiations that followed the Great Pole War and led to the signing of the Benthic Treaties, representatives of the Tsalal nations put up the most stubborn resistance to the terms imposed upon human occult groups and governments. This continued until the emissaries of BLUE HADES demonstrated their ability to manipulate the polar currents, thereby destabilizing the delicate climate processes that render the romantically named 'Last Continent' habitable. Only when threatened with a reasonable facsimile of their culture's vision of the apocalypse did the Tsalal submit, along with those powers within the wider world who had been galvanized by their example._

_Perhaps even more than the USA's infamous Black Chamber, the Tsalal chafe under the restrictions imposed by the Deep Ones. It is commonly believed that the only reason for their compliance is the clear ability of BLUE HADES to retroactively validate the Cook Hypothesis and bury the entire continent under several miles of ice._

_Though BLUE HADES rarely deign to share their opinions of human nations, several of their emissaries have opined, under anonymity, that this should have been done millennia ago._

-note seen on the desk of DSS James Angleton, X-Division, Special Operations Executive

_A significant factor in the Tsalal's relative lack of dependence on computational demonology is cultural: Tsalal OCCINTEL groups and other practitioners are generally less concerned with Krantzberg Syndrome, its variants, and other side effects of ritual magic than their equivalents elsewhere. With a few exceptions, the Tsalal are no more resistant to these issues than the rest of humanity. They are simply blasé. Whilst this lack of care is often attributed to the short lifespans and high rates of accidental death common to Antarctican societies, there is in fact a complex cultural foundation to their wanton attitude._

_Much of it is religiously motivated. It has been noted that compared to belief systems such as Christianity, Islam or Atheism, Antarctican religions are far easier to reconcile with magical awareness. Some even claim that Antarctic theology is essentially correct, though this idea has little support outside the Tsalal's own sphere. Whilst Tsalal practitioners are not univerally religious zealots, many religious concepts have crept into secular culture and influence their morality. Also, in stark contrast to the outside world, induction into supernaturally aware organizations often leads to a religious awakening in formerly lapsed Tsalal._

_Whilst many of Antarctica's religions are unremarkable, positing the same animistic spirits or creator pantheons as any other culture, there are several threads of thought to be found which are profoundly unusual, and they have contributed heavily to the acceptance of ritual magic's hazards._

_Perhaps the most influential is the maltheistic faith of the Zhu. Following an ancient diaspora referred to in legend as the Suffering Path, the Zhu religion revolves around a malevolent, hateful god who has sent his minions, the Qys, to harass and destroy the faithful. Some of the earliest human magic known has been found in artifacts from ancient Zhu practitioners, inscribed with crude protective charms meant to hide them from god's attention. Though the Zhudan people themselves are a minor culture in the present day, their religion has spread far beyond them, and its concepts have had a lasting impact on Tsalal theology. To those influenced by Zhu thought, the practice of magic is an act of heroism. It is seen as an act of great defiance against god, a Promethean theft of divine power. The damage to the practitioner seen in Krantzberg Syndrome and related disorders is seen as god striking back at those who would wield his tools, and the ensuing mental collapse and death is considered a form of martyrdom._

_A related concept has its roots in the polytheistic faith of the Hali culture. The Hali are said to believe in all gods simultaneously, crediting the state of the world to the actions of multiple competing and unaware pantheons whose creations overlap haphazardly. The 'true' god is portrayed as a primal Source, a spring from which creation comes into being, and is often seen as chaotic, inchoate and senseless. Similarly to the Zhu, the Hali perspective explains magical practice as humans wielding the power of creation traditionally constrained to the gods._

_Unlike the Zhu, Hali thought does not see the damaging side-effects of magic as a deliberate punishment. Rather, as one enters the realm of the gods they become affected by the primal chaos of the Source, becoming senseless and incoherent as they become ever closer to the wellspring of creation. When asked why the gods themselves do not wither, behave erratically and die, the standard reply is that perhaps they do; it would do a lot, the Hali say, to explain the state of the world._

_Secular concepts also influence the Tsalal view. There is a phrase, 'Chieftain's Disease', which sees common use in Tsalal culture as a euphemism for prion infection brought on by the excessive consumption of human flesh. Among the Tcho people of Tsalmothua, the act of cannibalism historically shifted over time from a desperation act in the depths of winter to a social rite. The ability to impose dominance on others so thoroughly that they were willing to offer their own children to be eaten became the centre of elaborate social rituals amongst the Tcho, and the impact of the ensuing prion outbreaks was predominantly seen in the elite. Thus erratic behaviour and mania are seen as connected to the higher classes, and mental collapse as the downfall of the powerful._

_This class aspect between the eater and the eaten has contributed to the Tcho view of Krantzberg Syndrome, and the cultural and economic primacy of the Tsalmothua region has spread their concepts to other Tsalal societies. Under Tcho philosophy madness is seen as the natural end state of power: Those strong and quick-witted enough to reach old age find their minds crumbling with dementia, whilst those powerful enough to feast on their fellow men run the risk of madness and death. So too do those who perform superhuman feats; be the source of strength personal, political or supernatural, the cost remains the same._

_It is important to note that the Tsalal do not shun computerized magic in its entirety; their practitioners are eminently capable and make much use of it, to varying degrees. But they consider the emphasis on safety and reliability seen in other nations to be cowardly. It is one thing to protect yourself, they will say, but another to do so so thoroughly that you become reliant on outside influences to act. In Antarctica, the bane of a practitioner's life is seen, quite simply, as the cost of doing business._

_Another posited factor is that several Tsalal OCCINTEL groups, most notably the Khaltsa Vhur of Tcho-Nakai (translation continues to prove elusive)_ _ and the Hali's Ashen Room, appear to heavily utilize, or possibly have been compromised by, individuals afflicted with Photologic Hemophagic Anagathic-_

_-_document for the eyes of Basil Northcote-Robinson, Lord Sanguinary of the Kingdom of England

_Oh, you were only two years old and feeble was your frame_  
_I feared that if we stayed behind they would roast you over flame,_  
_So I wrapped you in my cóta mór at the dead of night unseen_  
_And I heaved a sigh and I said goodbye to dear old Skibbereen._

_I walked for several leagues a day across the countryside._  
_I scavenged food from abandoned farms and in the homes of those who died._  
_Before I came to an empty port, and after singing a keen,_  
_I sailed off, and never saw again the land of Skibbereen._

_-_ lyrics from an Irish expatriate folk song following the War of Civilizations


	3. The Eyes of the Ice Wyvern

Imagine you are a teratorn, white death on wings, riding the circumpolar winds in the dead of the Antarctic winter. Once your kind soared over both the Americas, and a few made the trip to Antarctica in those ancient days before tectonic drift broke it away from the rest of the world. Your cousins are gone, now, but you are still here. Still hunting. You are one of the most formidable birds in the world, for the frigid environment of the South Pole has made you giant to conserve heat, and the great thermal updrafts generated where cold water meets warm coasts buoys your mighty wingspan. Your great bulk cruises on the wild and freezing air, gliding weightlessly over the icy landscape as you scan the land with unmatched eyes for dead or dying prey.

Of course, _you_ could never be a teratorn. That avian brain is highly intelligent, disturbingly adept at memorizing food caches and possessing of a visual cortex to outclass even owls, but it could not look upon its environment with the same wonder and glee as the humans below it who dream of flight. So let's alter this analogy:

Imagine you are one of those wretched things that call themselves Tsalal. A human whose ancestors were washed like jetsam down from Australasia tens of millennia ago. Descended from those poor unfortunate souls who choked down the near-inedible plants, hunted the strange beasts, weathered the six-month night and congregated, stockpiled, did whatever it took to stay alive. You are probably short, and find it easy to run to fat...if there's enough food to stop you looking like a skeleton. Dark hair predominates, though a few blondes and reds show up now and again. Your skin might be black as coal or shades of brown or even gray, thanks to a genetic adaptation against frostbite.

You live in Tsalmothua, those great southeastern plains which stretch on for leagues unending north to south between the two seas known as the Zhudan and Tsaotuhgua Luls. The hunter-gatherer gig was a tough one, out in this harsh and barren land, and necessity proved the mother of invention: Your people represent the oldest human civilization known to exist on earth. You are proud of this fact, for all that downworlder upstarts like to split hairs over your definition of the word 'civilized'. And when winter comes and blankets the world with ice and night for half the year, you and yours retreat underground like hibernating animals and pray, if you think there's anything worth praying to, that the food stocks will last until springtime.

And there's a few factors at work here which lead to some interesting phenomena.

Magic is applied mathematics. Merely think the right (or wrong) thought, solve the right equations in your head, and you can make changes in some platonic realm which has butterfly effects on our own mortal plane. You can attract the attention of strange things. It can also be spoken, in a grammar which rises emergent from the interplay of the rules which govern reality. It can be written, in stone or paper or in the words inside your head.

And writing, they say, evolved from economic necessity. Think of all those clay tablets in Mesapotamia, listing tributes, monitoring food stockpiles...but that's a lowlander example. Long beforehand the Yag were writing obsessively, trying to map the flooding and receding of the countless waterways on which their civilization depended. It spread from them, in time, to the plains of the Tsalmothua, and you can imagine how important records are when poor resource management is a matter of life and death.

Numbers, too. Scribe forgets to carry the one? Oh dear, looks like the food won't last the winter after all. Some alternative will have to be found. Hey, the scribe has a lot of fat and protein on him, and he's obviously not making very good use of it...

Never mind the cannibalism and torture; what will really shock the outside world is how the Tsalal will be among the only people to legitimately enjoy using Microsoft Excel.

And of course, the long night gets boring. Cramped and desperate, nowhere to go. You can't stay in bed all the time, even if you have company, and the community shakes with cabin fever. But your people have eaten everything which can be eaten and done their best with all the things which can't and Tsalmothua, ancient Tsalmothua, is perhaps the first site of agriculture in all the earth. There's not a mind-altering substance on the continent you're not aware of, and the plant stocks fester and ferment...

Your mind drifts, and it seems you stand outside your body, can see it lying still beneath yourself. You dream on, seeking strange patterns and mumbling alien words as you rise, through layers of hallucination, seeking the final breakthrough...

When it happens it’s almost anticlimactic, for you cast off the false images thrown up by your dreaming mind for a more sedate truth. You find yourself in a strange, shadowy place, the backstage of the great play that is reality, where you can see the cracks in the set and hear the rats in the walls. And when you turn your attention away from the scratching and chittering of mandibles behind the world's threadbare veil there's something to distract you, a glow, many glows, each one a whispering mind. And so you grab one, and latch on to it, and...

...you look out, from behind the eyes of a teratorn.

You seize it, you ride its mind, and oh what a joy it is, for winter is the teratorn's season when death takes its tithe of all the beasts and people whose strength or luck has run out, and you take its tastes as your own as you gorge yourself upon the frozen dead. Some of the greatest eyes in nature look out across the frozen wastes with savantlike intelligence, identifying food and confirming it with echolocative clicking, great wings plying the skies. And all the while your mind, able to look out through those eyes and appreciate what you see, glories in a release from the shackles of earthly life. It's easy to forget about that body back home, down in the stifling gloom.

Once, when starvation knocked at every door each winter, they would sometimes make lotteries when the ultimate choice had to be made. Other times they just took, from families too weak and downtrodden to resist. These days, when that question still arises in the more isolated or impoverished communities, there is no need. Things are civilised now. There is a system. You don't worry about such banal things, soaring as you do on the coriolis winds as clouds scud across the starry skies. Down there little minds dwell on little things, whilst yours revels in ecstacy and freedom.

But people will look askance at you, as you awaken only rarely to eat and drink, becoming bedridden, sleeping ever deeper. You abandon your human body almost completely, leave it corpse-still and barely breathing; you should probably do something about that before someone gets the wrong idea. A sign, maybe. 'I Aten't Dead', perhaps?

Oh. Too late. Can't begrudge them really; all that meat was just going to waste otherwise. A few children will live who might have died; you're a hero, really!

Your reward is to unravel slowly. The brain from which your consciousness is generated and projected shuts down, and you fall steadily to pieces which blow away in the winds of the higher reality. It is a pleasant death, as they go: you find it hard to care about it, for the parts that care are the parts which are crumbling, perhaps to be recycled, or eaten, or whatever it is that broken souls do. And at last there is only a teratorn, uncommonly clever and thoughtful, for behind its eyes lurks a shard of something which remembers being human.

Possibly you play at malice for a while, at vengeance. Spring comes and you direct the teratorn to strike at healthy humans instead of easier prey, the humans of your community, and perhaps in time you reclaim a morsel of the biomass which once housed the spark behind your eyeballs. But revenge feels empty and then the wanderlust takes over, an urge as avian as it is human, for summer is coming and that is when the great bird extends its range. And that spark which still calls itself _I_ drives it to explore, explore, explore.

Off we go then, over your homeland. Tsalmothua, where man in his desperate quest for heat first discovered coal, whose exhausted mineshafts became homesteads as humanity burrowed like ants to seek refuge in the thermal stability that rests in the earth's bosom. Tsalmothua, where the furnaces of the Sunken Cities have raged since before the days of Egypt and Babylon. Tsalmothua, where lies and festers the oldest and deepest and most sprawling of all cities, a city which has ruled nations, and which has had whole nations themselves live and do battle within its subterranean borders. A swarming hive of humanity with its own languages, species, ethnicities, where once great tributes of slaves were marched across the plains to be meat at its table. A place where the tunnels will never be mapped, and families go generations never seeing the light of the sun. The oldest continually inhabited city in human history: the Abomination that is Tcho-Tcho.

There is little light down there. It is a crime to strike a flame in the Sunken Cities, for the powers that be fear the consumption of oxygen, the buildup of smoke, the ignition of flammable gas. The people make do with bioluminescent fungi, with glowbugs woven in their hair, through touch and sound and scent. After tens of thousands of years of adaption, the night vision of the Tsalal is closer to that of H. _alfarensis_ than the rest of _sapiens_, and their sense of smell is superior to either.

Fire beneath the Tsalmothua is restricted to the great furnaces, heavily guarded and tended to at all times. Those furnaces form the core of each settlement: the water they boil provides mechanical power, is pumped around the city for central heating, is sterilized for drinking and sometimes even for washing. Elsewhere the Tcho take their meals cold, and do what they must in the dark.

Circle up above a Sunken City on the thermals that rise from the roaring mass of human industry and see the Zhudan Lul like a great blue jewel in the distance, then head inland to the great glacier that sits like a spider in a web across the centre of the continent. The Tsalal will not even look at it, and a wanted man in its shadow walks in safety. One day they say it will expand and cover all things, and that is how the world will end. But for a teratorn it is no threat; the great bird soars across it, raids the frozen caches of other birds, flies on. The spark that is left of you feels a frisson of sweet blasphemy at the action.

Beyond is the centre of the world. It didn't take the Tsalal long to realise the world spun, and thousands of years ago they found the axis of its rotation within the inland-reaching sea of the Khirhui Lul. Wars have been fought over it, temples consecrated and desecrated and cannibalized into other constructions on its shores, and now, built upon the bones of its predecessors is a great circular structure rearing up towards the sky. It is a glorious mongrel, a veritable Castle Gormenghast, countless architectural styles blending into one mighty celebration of Earth's spinning centre.

What's left of you can feel it, with senses barely awakened and not at all understood, this nexus of the world. The centre of Antarctica and South Pole of the world blazes with magical power: Countless ley lives converge upon it, each one fat and bloated with mana. The veneration and awe of the Tsalal focuses upon it like a laser, the sacrifices and bloodshed performed in its name anointing the site with blood, and the constant turning of earth grinds on like the world’s largest prayer wheel. Reality is thin here, and a practitioner could become a god with the energy that thunders through what is perhaps the greatest place of power upon the planet.

But it has its defences.

Up, and we touch upon the river systems on the edge of Azul, those coastal colonies, the city-states of that hybrid western nation. We will come to them in due time; but for now, we double back on ourselves.

Now we come to green fields, and to a shining sea of blue encapsulated by land on all sides. It is as large as a nation and as deep as the sky, known by ignorant outsiders as Lake Hali after the nation that blooms upon its shores. The Hali are oft-considered the most civilised of the Tsalal peoples, open to the ideas of outsiders and twisting them to their will. Down in those cities you will see countless races rubbing shoulders, and here and there among the holy places of the Tsalal you will see where there have been converts to downworld religions: Buddhist and Hindu temples, Shinto shrines, even the spires of churches and the domes of mosques. These last are oft-times the targets of grafitti and vandalism, for their faithful are Quislings to much of Tsalal religious thought.

But also you will see the great temples of the Hali's ancient rulers, a dynasty raised to godhood like the Roman emperors and Egyptian pharaohs: The Kings in Yellow, who from their capital in Karkose pioneered gunpowder and with its might took on the mantle of divinity.

The Hali have been invaded by every nation in this world, and have drawn from each culture. The result is a people whose open-mindedness and cosmopolitan nature is equalled only by the sadism they visit upon their enemies.

Look down with those great bird eyes and you will see a building open to the sky, something like an ancient Greek theatre or an American sports stadium. It is designed to hold a crowd, to let them see and hear all the things that take place upon its great stone centre. The summer sun is shining now and the benches they are filling; vendors hawk their wares as fans and families swarm the bleachers.

A put-upon wife tries to corall her lively children as she negotiates for chunks of mothbeast on skewers, frustration mounting as she sees her husband holding court with his friends without a care in the world. The bottles of fermented roots have already been cracked open, and they vie to outdo one another with predictions of the day to come. There are three things every Hali man thinks he can do, she thinks sourly, as her youngest screams for yagberry juice.

Some distance away a young man is buying his date something to eat. He's not used to this sort of thing but he's desperate to impress, and after the cost of the tickets there's no point trying to be frugal. His beloved's eyes widen in surprise as he offers her an apple, imported from the world below and sold on at a premium, as rosy-red as the blood that rushes to his cheeks as she takes a delicate bite and shivers delightedly. She kisses him then, lightly; it's his first, and he will remember forever the softness of her lips and the taste of the sweet juice upon them, and for one silly second, as the cheers start, it almost feels like they're cheering for him. Then he smiles at her, butterflies fluttering happily in his chest, and takes her hand as they walk together to their seats.

The cheers rise to a howl as the torturers walk on stage, their victims shackled and manacled and weeping in terror. It is said whole armies have turned back rather than face the Hali, that men who did not fear death were unable to bear the prospect of being taken alive.

On now, north again.

On the endless steppes there dwell the Ptarh, who live in the saddles of their shaggy sloth mounts. The first steroid users in human history, they are renowned as a mad warrior race, and their method of living has changed little over the years: It has served them well enough to have outlived every empire on planet Earth, including their own. Clockwise is Wang-Gash, where the nomads who trade and intermingle with the people of the stone monasteries would kill any who dared suggest they were descended from the Ptarh. They have their own cruel myths. There on the broken plateaus and barren cliff faces of Leng the wind howls fiercely, distorted by the alien shapes of twisted rock formations, where the grim-faced riders roam. But there is beauty here, and life. The steep cliffs shield a thousand sheltered vales from the lashing wind, and rainwater flows down into the emerald valleys of Azh in babbling streams and spectacular waterfalls. In these crevices the bleak land of Wang-Gash blooms to life, green and vibrant and bustling.

Counterclockwise from the Ptarh's lands we come to the great wetlands, their rivers fed by meltwater from the Shining Thunder Mountains. The great nation of Yag, be it the people or the berry or the land that first held the name, and the Shadowlands. These I will leave to another mind to chronicle. You'll see him soon. In the meantime there are other places, other peoples: The Zhu and the Ghault, the Khnaaresh of the Dragon Isles and, Dead Gods forbid, the Cold Isands with their Remade Men. To be visited in their proper order, of course.

Ah. Here he is. Down there, by that river whose bridge leads to the town and its terraced farms. Just north of where that fortress-temple of the Zhu faith clings to the hillside. Amongst the fields, the dotted homesteads, the visitor comes. His arrival will add more peoples, many more, as the butterfly wings of history raise hurricanes in the days and years to come.

Time flows strangely between worlds, and the Host’s oracles have guided him to what they feel is the most appropriate point. Not that their knowledge is complete. It has been roughly a century and a half since the first visitors from outside landed in Antarctica. In fact, one of the first outworlder explorers since is just finishing his trip. Chances are he’ll stick around when he hears what’s happening. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here.

There is a flare of Cherenkov radiation as the portal yawns wide and the figure steps through, dead on his feet. He has long black hair over a high-boned face that fails to hide the long, pointed, twitching ears familiar to his kind, and his catlike eyes are dilated from exertion and stimulant drugs. He has rings on his fingers and a gemstone on a clasp around his neck that sifts the sands of probability, that calculates risk to dodge being buried beneath glaciers or aged to dust in an instant by the travel between worlds. Eerily tall and thin to a downworlder, let alone a Tsalal, he would be recognisable in an instant as alien. And then there are the clothes, finely cut from the best material, dark and well-fitting shirt and pants of silk beneath a robe of beautiful quality. It is no wonder that in Europe after the fall of Rome, the natives referred to alfär explorers as the Gentry.

Then there is another glow, as tattoos of power flare up over his body. Then all you would see was a young Tsalal man, stocky and dark-skinned. Teeth stained black by kulka root, hair cut short in the style of the day. Not that this invader knows the first thing about Antarctican culture. Not yet. But the minds of observers fill in the blanks.

Agent Fourth of Spies and Liars treads the South Pole's earth beneath his boots, the first of the People to do so.

He will be far from the last.


	4. Cassandra's Prophecy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 4: Cassandra's Prophecy
> 
> In which a certain individual receives a grim premonition of the future. But who knows? With advance warning, many disasters can be averted...or turned around on those who would inflict them.

Now, even as Agent Fourth was steadying himself on the dry earth some miles away, another figure of note was making their way through their common haunts in the land of Yag. Not as lithe and fleet of foot as Fourth, not by a long shot, but unlike the bewildered alfär he was relaxed and sure of purpose. 

Let’s go see him, shall we?

Through corridors of stone lit by flickering gas lamps, dark and shadowy to those with eyes less keen, the click of boots and walking staff echoed off the austere walls. The priest Ijh'!derz hummed to himself as he moved, the melody of an old war song, lyrics half forgotten. Things were quiet at this time, and there were none to hear as he began to sing to himself in a cracked and crooning voice. If there had been, if they could have heard him, the words were something along the lines of this:

_Through the rockets and the cannons, through the deadly waves and storms / until Albion lies shattered, and its flags in tatters fall._

He smiled in recollection and believe me, dear reader, when I say that his smile was an unnerving sight indeed.

Ijh'!derz trailed off as he passed his favourite wall hanging and paused to study it - a painting in oil colours depicting a group of wretched people hiding from the elements in a sparse shelter, the sun setting for winter behind them. They cowered from the harsh wind behind their meagre protections, huddling around their fire, and the rain that fell was to be followed by a wave of ice. But there was hope, for there beside their meagre supplies of wood was a pile of small black rocks. A small thing, but a meaningful one, one which the painter had placed into the centre of the piece to draw it to attention. Coal.

High above their heads the storm raged, seemingly unstoppable, but from the right distance a trick of perspective formed the sweeps and whorls of the clouds into the image of a frustrated human face. God saw the coal, saw the new source of heat and comfort and prosperity, and was, for all his rain and thunder, impotent.

The heartlands of the Zhu lay far away, but the faith of that paranoid race had inspired religions far and wide across the Southern Continent. Beyond, even: believers had carried their legacy to South America, to Australia, to every place where the Tsalal had fought and conquered. Indeed, there were even those in the world below who had converted without ever seeing a member of the antipodean nations, in lands where they had never tread--though there were less of those lands now than there were.

This did not surprise Ijh'!derz, though he had his doubts about the orthodoxy of such believers. For he knew that the faith was attractive; even without the aid of scripture, one needed only to see enough of life, to undergo the right experiences and look at things through a certain light to reach the self evident truth at the heart of his religion.

God is real, and he _hates_ you.

Ijh'!derz had read of philosophers from the world below who spent centuries, millennia struggling with the reality and necessity of hardship, the competition and struggle inherent in the world, the fact that continued life invariably demands brutal death. Contorting themselves in knots to justify the contrast between the state of reality and the existence of a benevolent, loving, all-powerful divinity. How ridiculous, when all one had to do was turn the question around, let the scales fall from one's eyes, and see the obvious answer.

You were made in God's image, to be his _plaything_.

Almost alone of his congregation, Ijh'!derz had visited the world below. He had seen how even the deepest winter was easily weathered and the sweetest foods literally grew on trees. It was easy, he knew, to latch on to the positive side of life in a world like that. Like any abusive relationship, when one knows nothing but contempt even the slightest glimmer of approval or respect will have them eating out of their abuser's hand. That old deceiver, the Malevolent, must surely laugh until he cried at the sight of the lower world's delusions. But all delusions end —Ijh'!derz knew that well— and here on the top of the world a chilly clarity prevailed.

To be moral is to _make war on God_.

That was why the church was also a fortress. The fortifications and security were stylized, ritualized, with a metal portcullis and thick curtain walls. They were adorned with religious inscriptions of warding and protection, symbolic talismans to bar God and his angels from entering this holy place. But they were practical too, with metal-shuttered windows and armed guards. Here in the back country, inter-village warfare was carried out with the vigour and enthusiasm of a sport. The church would not survive a real attack of course, not from heavy gunfire or military-grade rocketry, but it could handle an armed mob easily enough. Or the sort of home-made tube artillery whose construction was a common hobby amongst those who hate the neighbours.

In the end, Ijh'!derz thought, the details of one's belief was not the most important thing in the world. If the spirit was there then the rest would follow when the hateful ferocity of the afterlife blew all illusions away, and the Faithful were forced to band together to survive.

Thus contented, the old priest limped along down the stone-hewn corridors and cursed his aching bones. Long years of hard work had done for his back, the sun had weathered his complexion and winter had taken two toes and a finger back in the day. His skin was like old leather, and only copious dye masked the march of deathly colour through his hair and his beard. In truth Ijh'!derz was not particularly ancient, but Antarctica was ferocious and its people lead hard lives. Fifty could pass for seventy, often enough, and there was a belief amongst the antipodeans that the downworlders were nigh-ageless. But Ijh'!derz's body was not the only thing to be crumbling before its time.

Some days he woke and did not know where he was; others he referred to parishioners with names long dead. He drooled uncontrollably, had savage fits. And he did not do so from age. Even now, becoming increasingly decrepit and distant with every passing year, Ijh'!derz was treated with some respect—if only in the hope that he might pass on some of his stranger lore before he died. Admittedly it would not hold forever; on one memorable occasion he had woken from a nap and believed he was back in Britain, then killed one of the apprentices with heavy blows of his stave. The younger priests had sidelined him after that.

This time, as he settled into his chair to sleep before the next lecture, he dreamed that he was in the future.

Ijh'!derz watched the world burn. Villages abandoned, towns on fire, populations slaughtered. He watched crowds trample one another to death in an effort to escape, armies collapsing in on themselves as the howl of rockets and the roar of gunfire proved futile against the encroaching foe. But who? What force, what power did this? They were not people. Not even down-world people. He had fought in the wars, and the wars were not like this.

Not until the end. 

The invaders were hardly even seen until the battle was all but won, and they strode down the bloodied streets like conquering kings. Their figures hurt to look upon, and Ijh'!derz saw tears turn to blood as men and women keeled over at the sight. He watched men bursting into flame trying to look the invaders in the eye. They were monstrously tall and thin, like an exaggeration of the pale people below, and wore reflective armour of shining silver. He wasn't even sure it was armour, at first. Maybe that was their flesh.

On demon horses they rode, slavering, fanged and horned. The riders held maces, batons from which auroras danced, and the tongues of lightning they spat obliterated man and shaghut and building alike. With a start of recognition he saw one person explode into fragments of stone, the pieces glowing red from heat and punching into the people around like a fragmentation grenade. He had hoped never to see such things again.

The details of dreams were eerie. Ijh'!derz saw them raise their visors, vile clear-plated things on which glowed strange sigils and laughing skulls of awful colour, and on those high cheekbones and sharp teeth and slanted ears he somehow saw the faces of Englishmen he had killed. The dream took him to a city he had walked through in Azul and Ijh'!derz saw the tabards of the guild of architects on executed men, nailed to crosses like the heroes of Rome had done to the son of the Malevolent. Below the bodies walked cowled, androgynous beasts who drank the blood of the crucified men like the torture surgeons of Hali, wreathed in fire that rose from yellow to blue to the colour of the abyss.

Ijh'!derz had seen many things in his time. He had been there, in Britain. He may have been a mere priest but he had read and he had explored in his time, had taken part in unspeakable ceremonies in whispered places, had experienced things most would deny. And he knew some of the symbols on that armour. He saw the colours, the faces, the many ways of killing. He saw masters cast down and slaves raised up, death from a clear blue sky and the end of the world.

He saw the Qys.

And he woke up screaming.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a nasty little call-back to The Nightmare Stacks in this one. See if you can find it.


	5. First Impressions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An alien is haunting Yag. It's traditional.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a bit rough but whatever. Also let's see how well I do at this 'unreliable narrator' lark.

An alien is haunting Yag. It's traditional.

It has been more than one hundred and fifty years since poor, doomed Captain Cook sailed into the bays of the Paant'n Lul, the Sea of Tranquility, the great body of water which flanks Yag's west side. His was, it must be said, a rather more dramatic entry than the one which Agent Fourth makes: There was hysteria upon the seafront then, at the insane wooden construct with its sails of deathly white. To say nothing of the cannon! 

Then there was cannon again, a mere handful of years back, when the lower world launched their ill-fated mission of vengeance. Even after they were beaten back, bands of stranded downworld soldiers lurked Antarctica for months before, like most foreign pests, the winter did them in. And the learned amongst the Yag are still in a furor over the recent visit of Howard Philips, the famed explorer who saw the secrets of the Cold Islands and lived to tell the tale. Of course he visited everyone, but the Yag count it as precedent, just the same.

And now another alien? That's just getting ridiculous.

Nonetheless, Agent Fourth arrives. The alfär officer steps onto the earth of this new world with a stumble and scans his surroundings with catlike eyes. He is disoriented and confused, but he does his best to get his bearings. At first he feels nothing but relief, closing his eyes and catching his breath; the dance between worlds was hard, and a single misstep would have cast him into the eternal void. It is some time before his body stops shaking from the exertion, and before his mind can truly register his surroundings.

He's cold. It seems ridiculous, since he's just come from a land of glaciers. But he's been lurking underground for most of that time, for the People dug fast and deep when they landed. Here the air is cool and the sweat of his exhausting journey becomes chilly and clammy against his skin, making him fidget uncomfortably. But he's a soldier; he'll take cleanliness and luxury when he can get it, but he's slept on as many hard floors as he has feather beds, and he's not about to get squeamish at a bit of filth. 

It's dark here, too. The sun lurks low on the horizon, as if slipping towards evening - but it won't be evening here for months. And the day is dull, as if overcast, though the sun is clearly visible between the scattered clouds. On the surface back home - and oh, how strange it is to call that dead land 'home' - the ice is stark and bright, reflecting every scant ray of light. But here the hills of soil and the leaves of green are strangely...muted. 

Of course they are: This land receives only a fraction of the light that strikes the earth at the equator, so it would be dim no matter the state of it. His low light vision is spectacular so it doesn't really matter, but the effect is still a little disconcerting.

See, on a dead continent you expect such things. In an endless expanse of ice and rock and howling wind, with unnerving spires and honeycomb structures reaching up towards the sky, well, a washed-out sun is the least of a person's worries. To see the sun acting so strange in a normal land, a living land? It just doesn't seem right.

Then the reality of what he's just done hits him, and blows away such banal thoughts. 

He has travelled between worlds. He's done it, he's made the journey, and now the fate of the People rests on his shoulders. The elfin figure laughs at that, a high and giggling sound, and his chest swells as he imagines the honours that might yet be heaped at his feet. Even if, he has to admit, this new place hardly holds a candle to the land of his birth. 

He's stood upon a gentle slope, between the peaks of two low hills covered in the leaves of some low-growing plant. The air smells of earth and growing things and, yes, that's manure. Truly, a glorious start.

He'll have to get used to it, he supposes. He'll be here for a while, will be living like a local as soon as he finds a face to steal. It could be a long time before they get this place sorted out.

The earth is dry beneath his feet, and nearby a path winds its way up amongst the hillsides. He can't see far because the slopes get in the way, but a path implies a destination and any way is better than none, right? This decided, Fourth walks towards the dirt track between the hills, stretching his aching legs and crushing the leaves of the unfamiliar plants beneath his boots. Admittedly, plenty of his own world's plants would be unfamiliar to him unless served up cooked on a plate. A cabbage? Some sort of tuber, maybe? Who knows. Who cares.

But what he does care about is the way the plants are growing: In ordered rows. Instead of the random growths you would expect from a wilderness, both hillsides teem with orderly plant life. Here and there too, he sees, there are fences. Little rock walls to seperate one field from the next. Going by their cobbled-together look, they seem to have been made without mortar. There's a word for that, isn't there? Cyclopean. In any case, it's signs of at least a dim sort of intelligence. Agriculture, if he's any judge. So the oracles guided him right, he thinks with a smirk.

A shadow falls upon him and Fourth tenses, looking up into the sky. His long-fingered hand flicks to his belt like a gunslinger reaching for his pistol, and touches the short baton he wears upon his slender hip. If it's a fight, he's ready. 

The shadow belongs to a bird, its wings briefly occulting the sun's light. From the size of the shadow he briefly assumes it's close by, but swiftly realises his mistake: The beast is a long way off. It's just very, very large. Fourth isn't sure if that's better; it glides like a predator, and for a moment he has the uncanny feeling that it's watching him far more closely than a dumb animal should. He keeps a wary eye on it, but soon enough it glides off on its merry way.

As Fourth begins to follow the path between the hills, the Oracle Stone on his chest flickers and tingles. He's going the right way.

Once he gets to pick a local's brain, Agent Fourth will be able to tell you could that he has landed near the edge of the Yag lowlands, where dry hills begin to break up the floodplains and the ubiquitous berries that the vale is famed for become interspersed with other, less water-hungry crops. And as the geography and the ecology changes so too do the people, foreigners mingling in greater numbers, until at last you reach the border to the city states of Azul, where nomads still pick their way around the landmines and unexploded rockets left over from the two nation's quarrels. He'll be able to tell you all sorts of other things about Yag too, some very juicy things indeed. But for now, Agent Fourth only knows what he can infer.

The stone on Fourth's chest nudges him ever more as he walks along the path, as it leads him ever upward, as he acclimatizes to the cool air and the washed-out sun that lolls idly forever on the horizon. Until, at last, on stiff legs and aching feet, the otherworldly explorer reaches the crest of one of the hills, taller than the rest.  
He can see to the horizon, now. 

And he stares a while.

He has come to the lip of a great valley, where the hillside travels down, down, steeper and steeper until it reaches the banks of a wide, slow-moving river. And it takes his breath away.

For the Yagberries are in bloom, a great riot of colour that festoons the once-barren hillsides in red and gold and blue and green and all other shades that beautiful growing things present, in terraced gardens which descend like stairs down the hillside, dotted with trees that sway gently in the wind. The breeze reaches Fourth and brings with it the perfume of flowers, sweet and gentle, and the elf finds his lips twitch as he breathes in deeply of its bouquet. Little paths wind through the berryfields, overhung by flowering plants, making their way ever downward to the river.

It's a big river, wide and fat with floodwater and silt. But it sparkles nonetheless in the dim sun, water moving slowly on its inexorable path. And all across its length he can see the signs of intelligence, and construction. An elaborate system of waterways and locks breaks the river up, regulating its flow. He sees boats, one waiting to be lowered downriver by tiny figures he cannot make out, bipedal and shambolic things.

Bridges crisscross the river, brick walls and flood defences ring its sides, great stoneworks shore up islands in the middle of the water and Fourth sees structures, stilted houses that rise above the river surface and delicate spired towers like something from a fairytale which sway just like the trees. Here and there thick foundations host more squat constructions, solid and tough like the keep of a castle. The town below is built of wood and stone and brick and who knew what else, the style strange but...certainly not ugly. Here too there are bridges, from one building to the next, some many meters above the surface, walkways between isolated riverhouses and towers in the sky. Flags and pennants adorn the buildings as if in competition with the greenery that surrounds them, decorations of every colour save, he notices, for white.

In the ever-setting sun of that eternal evening he looks down on that valley of flowers with its peaceful river and dreamlike houses, and Fourth has a feeling they've come to a good place. He smiles, and it's a strange smile to see on one of the People, for instead of the manic grins or tooth-baring aggression so common to them, it is gentle, even happy. Alone in the world for now, Fourth finds himself showing a little emotion.

It's a bad habit, so he wipes the expression from his face.

The Spy and Liar begins to walk down the hillside, heading for the paths. Even a new world must hold to old truths, and the folly of showing weakness is an ancient rule indeed. Fourth's mind is solid as steel, this he knows, but it would be unwise to draw suspicion to himself. Spies and Liars are well known for being...strange. To take the face and name and memory and personality and if times are dire, even the soul of another, many others over the course of a career...it can have a toll on a person, that can, and odd behaviour can make others look at them askance.

Besides, they're shifty. In a society where one's superiors can compel one to speak, warping the truth is a valuable skill, and one at which the Liars are adept. It would not be quite accurate to say they garner more suspicion than other alfär, but only because everyone's suspicion levels are pretty much constantly at 100% already. Then there's the other reason.

Fourth's lip curls into a far more typical alfär expression; that of contempt. The Spies and Liars are known to have an unusually high proportion of emotional cripples. Every race needs some degree of empathy, if only to successfully raise their children, but there are those in which the instinct is hyperexpressed and disgustingly mistargeted. Such individuals are culled, obviously, but a few always slip through the cracks. And of those that do, a distressingly high amount are found in the ranks of the Spies and Liars before making a swift career change to be a corpse. It makes sense. If you're hiding your nature constantly, what else would you do for a living?

But, logical or not, the association disgusts Fourth to his core. Such parasites can only carve out a niche in the civilisation built by the righteously cruel, surviving thanks to the power and drive of their betters. His rage bubbles swiftly, delight turning mercurially to fury, and he decides to keep an eye out for any local life that might serve as a source of catharsis. With long fingers, he plays with the handle of his knife.

Into the garden of berry bushes and twisted trees he walks, the flower-scent becoming stronger. There is still manure beneath it, like Equoid sweat beneath a rider's perfume, but he's getting used to that, and the blossoms cover it more than amply. The noise picks up, too. Birdsong, flying things he does not recognise chattering in the trees and the hedgerows, the noise pretty in its simplicity. The age-old song of territory, food, mating calls. He can relate, but this doesn't stop him from snatching one out of the air to bear the brunt of his bad mood. Once he's done with it he wipes his parrying dagger on the grass as his ears curl forwards in contentment.

Bees buzz between the flowers, big and oddly coloured things, and he leaves them on their way as they bumble through the air, wondering what honey made from those pretty flowers might taste like. This stimulates his stomach, which growls to remind him of his hunger. Casually, he plucks a few ripe-looking berries and waits for the Oracle Stone to confirm they aren't poison. If the People can't eat local fare they'll starve, and the Diviners claimed this was a world they could live in, so it should be fine...but you never know.

He gets the go-ahead and chows down. They're delicious, a sweet explosion in a mouth long since acclimatized to time-stoppered iron rations, and he shivers in delight. Soon he's grabbing more, berry juice smeared across his mouth as he licks happily at his fingers. There's still bird blood on a few of them, but that has a nice tang of its own. Brighter berries are better, he soon realises, more ripe, though even the darker ones have a nice tartness to them, and Dead Gods, this is the best food he's had in months. _Yes_, he thinks dreamily. _This is a fertile land, and we will thrive. We will rule over all this land, and we will call it-_

A movement overhead jerks him from his reverie. 

Monkeys!

About the size of a cat, long-limbed and chubby in a way he finds unusual. But then this place must get cold, so no wonder they have a bit more padding than the ones he's used to. First one, then two, then a whole troupe of the sleek-furred little things come swinging by through the trees as he watches, eating forgotten. Their faces, so much like people, gaze around with a spark of curiosity as they descend into the bushes, and begin stuffing berries into their mouths with their deft little hands. Fourth feels a stab of annoyance at that, as if he hadn't been doing the same thing just moments ago, but then he notices something interesting about them.

They aren't actually eating the berries. They're just storing them in their now-bulging cheeks. They take the ripe ones only, inspecting them carefully, then leaping away once the job is done. Smaller members of the troupe go foraging on the ground for ones that have fallen from the branches, and he sees one snap the neck of a small bird that had been foraging for them itself. He wonders what they would have done if he'd kept eating as he watched them.

As he watches, he sees another thing: the monkeys are marked. Their ears are docked like a plantation slave, and blue dye can be seen on their backs. These are not wild pests looting the crop, he soon infers. They're domesticated. 

He follows the monkeys as they return the way they came, but he lacks their talent at swinging through the trees. Instead he takes the paths that weave through the gardens, adjusting for the sight and sound of other monkeys, other troupes, as they make their way to and from some common destination. In time he finds it, a large clearing ringed by trees, and it is here that Fourth first meets a local.

They stand between a row of buzzing beehives and a great vat, wherein the returning monkeys spit their cargo of berries with each trip, and loll at ease as they inspect the crop. Fourth thinks he's beginning to understand. Many animals stash food for the winter, and Antarctican winters must be deadly whatever the world. If these monkeys create a communal stash to weather the troupe through the lean times, and the local subspecies of People noticed this, it stands to reason they would try to use that habit for themselves. The greater life form twists the lesser to serve it, he thinks. As it should be.

This decided, he turns to inspect what passes for the dominant life form of this world. He's not impressed.

  
He's pretty sure they're a child, for one. The true People are usually taller than their wretched otherwordly cousins, it's true, but not to this extent. In dark shirt and trousers he can't even tell their sex. But what is really strange is the colour.

The creature is jet black. Utterly. Black hair, long and straight. Black skin, not just dark brown but genuinely as dark as coal, striking in its way. Even the teeth, he notices with a start. They're stained, or maybe they're born that way. Looking closer, he's pretty sure even the whites of the eyes aren't as bright as they should be.

He can tell this well enough because the creature is staring right at him, relaxed posture forgotten. It's ears are small and floppy and lifeless, like a Magi after the snip, but he recognises a ready stance when he sees one. He recognises also the way it draws a strange tool that had been propped against the vat where the monkeys dumped their cargo. The object itself is alien - some sort of tube with a handle - but the local holds it like a crossbow, and whilst they aren't pointing it at him, that could very quickly change. He isn't stupid; he knows a weapon when he sees one.

He heavily doubts the thing is as dangerous as a crossbow; he's seen what they can do, those mighty arbalests with their titanium frames that no alfär could draw unassisted, loaded with mana engines and guided by life-seeking daemons who lurk in the shining sharp tips of their bolts. If that alien tool has half the strength of the Cavalry Division's short-range armour piercers, it could tear him in half with pinpoint accuracy from hundreds of meters away.

It probably isn't. But he really, really doesn't want to find out.

So he floods his illusion with mana, his glamour of whatever an onlooker considers 'normal' intensifying threefold. He has no shortage of power to draw upon, and the arcane tattoos that cover his body tingle as he weaves his web. This person doesn't trust strangers, but now he is no stranger. He is one of them, one of you, a common thing, a familiar thing, not alien at all.

The figure relaxes a little. But only a little.

_What a paranoid place_, Fourth thinks.

So he gives the figure a wide berth and slips away down the hill. He's not so desperate as to steal the face of a child.

Down, down, through the flower-framed walkways as the monkeys swing and the bees buzz and the birds chatter angrily. Down stone stairways between terraces, admiring the swirling murals that mark the borders of the orchards. Down to the paved road, to the riverside, to the bridge below which the silty water flows sluggishly on its way to some unknown destination, and here Fourth sees a sure sign of civilisation.

A hangman's gibbet stands by the bridge, its occupant twisting and turning like some huge grim fruit. He's now sure that local he saw was not full grown, for this one is much taller and thicker of form. Different skin, too: Ash grey. Or maybe that's just what death does to these people.

Though Fourth's face betrays no emotion, his ears twitch in a way other alfär would recognise as an approving nod. Any race with the ferocity and drive to attain civilisation is by nature a fractious one, and needs a firm hand and fierce authority to marshal that power towards a common goal. Execution, a public display of naked force, is a sure sign of a power exerting its authority, of a people who need such displays to stay in line. This is a civilised land for sure.

But this sign confuses him, for there are no signs of the other surefire sign of a civilised race. Mana. There is no power here, that he can feel. And that local he saw before did not seem bound by geass. And yet there is construction, and organisation, and authority. A mystery to be solved in due course.

It does not occur to Fourth that these people, undeserving of the proper noun, could pose any threat to his own. If there were a hominid which could math the alfär at their own game, why had they not rampaged at will throughout the cosmos, plundering a hundred worlds unchallenged and settling down in empire and glory in their chosen land? If a People to equal his own existed, they would have killed each other by now.

Fourth sits below the slowly swaying corpse, and plans his next move.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Right you people have a CHOICE. I'm going to write a few little interludes/ vignettes tentatively titled something like "Tales From the Last Continent" or "Once Upon A Time in Antarctica" or something equally twee, featuring various Laundryverse setting elements and how they intersect with this weird little world. Comment to vote, should I start with:
> 
> a. EQUESTRIAN RED SIRLOIN
> 
> b. BLUE HADES
> 
> c. MAGINOT BLUE STARS

**Author's Note:**

> Continuing on from the starting notes, since starting this fic I've had a lot of fun imagining a world where these southern elves didn't show up (and the canon Host probably did their thing instead, in a rather warped England) resulting in a more classic LF tale wherein one or more of the poor Laundryverse protags has to embark on a mission to 21st Century Antarctica, which...well, I'm getting ahead of myself.


End file.
